On March 26, there was a mistake in Italy's Protezione Civile bulletin, on which they had entered 449 deaths for Piedmont instead of the correct number: 499. Consequently, the total number of deaths and cases for March 26 was incorrectly calculated and reported by Protezione Civile.
Worldometer spotted the error, confirmed it by calling Piedmont officials directly, and corrected it for everybody else (such as Johns Hopkins - which uses us as a source - and a number of major media outlets around the world that use Worldometer as a source as well, including Financial Times, The New York Times, and Business Insider).
This discrepancy was clearly due to a typing error by Italy's Protezione Civile, not to Piedmont's new deaths missing in the national report, as incorrectly stated by some media, given that the number of new deaths reported by Piedmont on March 26 was 16, whereas the amount missing was greater than that: 50.
Some of the same media (including La Repubblica and Corriere della Sera in Italy) that on March 26 had changed the number from 662 to 712 after our correction, on March 27 were reporting a daily change of 969 based on March 26 incorrect number of 662. BBC, Bloomberg, The Guardian, were also reporting the wrong number on March 27.
Others, such as The New York Times, Reuters, Financial Times, Sky News, Al Jazeera stayed consistent with the March 26 correction and reported a daily change of 919 new deaths for March 27. Even Italy's Protezione Civile, in its March 27 press briefing specified that 50 deaths of the 969 being reported should be attributed to March 26 count due to an error and later published a new corrected version of its March 26 report.
This is not the first instance in which we are called to clarify that our numbers are correct, while numbers reported by other media outlets are incorrect (and not the other way around as many emails we receive claim).
Italian media were reporting the change in active cases (a lower number) rather than the change in total cases (a higher number), representing it as "newly infected" when, in fact, it represents the "change in active cases."
Newly infected, meaning the number of people who have tested positive to the virus in the last day, is the number shown on our website, which corresponds to the change in total cases in accordance with the international standards set by the WHO and followed by all countries.
The change in active cases (what Italian media labeled as "newly infected") is the result of the following formula:
(newly infected) - (new deaths) - (new recoveries)
All data, including total cases ("casi totali") is available on Italy's Dipartimento della Protezione Civile official repository